Exploring Skills Foundation

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Skills Foundation

    Skills Foundation is a platform powered by AI Search that processes industry skills data to help organizations build a skills-based workforce. It serves as the foundational technology for Talent Development applications in ServiceNow, enabling skill-centric career planning and supporting both individual growth and business outcomes. Skills Foundation integrates exclusively with Talent Development solutions.

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    Key Features

    • Skill Validation in Manager Hub: Managers can review and validate employee skill proficiency during scheduled conversations, ensuring accuracy of skill profiles.
    • Skills-driven Learning Recommendations: The platform provides tailored learning suggestions based on employee skills, enhancing engagement and productivity through integration with Learning applications.
    • Proactive Prompts: Actionable insights are delivered contextually via channels like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and SMS to guide managers and employees in skill development activities.
    • Multi-language Support: Skill names and descriptions are translated according to user language preferences, requiring appropriate language plugins and manual translation upload for custom skills.
    • Hiring Core Integration: Hiring Core stores hiring requirements data, with Skills Foundation analyzing this data to recommend skills for role groups, aiding recruitment alignment with skill needs.
    • Skill Importing: Employees can import skills from resumes and LinkedIn profiles to populate their skill profiles (available to Pro-plus license holders).
    • Skill Recommender: Employees can search and add skills they want to develop, facilitating proactive personal skill growth.

    Key Outcomes

    • Comprehensive Employee Skill Profiles: Offers a full view of employee skills by combining employee input and external data analysis.
    • Pre-seeding of Skills: Automatically identifies and prompts employees to update essential skills based on role and title data.
    • Job Architecture Association: Links organizational career data with relevant skills to support workforce planning.
    • Validated Skills Tracking: Ensures skill proficiency levels are confirmed by managers, with visibility for employees to foster transparency and trust.
    • Activity Insights for Managers: Enables managers to monitor employee progress on skill development activities before validation.
    • Accelerated Workforce Transformation: By connecting skills to actionable insights and learning, organizations can more effectively develop talent and achieve business goals.

    The Skills Foundation platform uses AI Search to process your industry skills data. Learn how Skills Foundation can help transform your organization to build a workforce that is based on skills.

    Overview of Skills Foundation

    The core capability of the platform is the underlying technology that resides in the Skills Foundation engine.

    Skills Foundation overview

    Skills Foundation for Talent Development

    The Skills Foundation engine acts as the foundational layer that powers all the capabilities within Talent Development. Talent Development applications use skills at its core to guide managers and employees through their career plans. This approach not only supports individual development but also contributes to achieving better business outcomes. For more information, see Talent Development.

    Note:
    Skills Foundation is only integrated with Talent Development applications.

    Skill Validation in Manager Hub

    As a manager, you can review and validate the skill proficiency levels updated by your employees by opening the conversations scheduled with them. Within Conversations there’s a dedicated section that offers details about skills that require validation. For more information, see Validate skills in Manager Hub.

    Skills-driven Learning recommendations

    Talent Development uses Skills Foundation to deliver learning recommendations for employees and their managers, keeping them engaged and productive. For more information, see Learning overview. The Skills Foundation application integrates with Learning to introduce skills-driven learning search results that your managers can use to recommend courses based on the skills of your employees. For more information, see Learning integration with Skills Foundation.

    Proactive Prompts integrated with Skills Foundation

    Proactive Prompts enable contextual and proactive engagement for your managers and employees by bringing actionable insights as prompts into their flow of work. You can use these prompts in multiple engagement channels, such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, and the short messaging service (SMS). For more information, see Proactive Prompts for Skills Foundation.

    Support for multiple languages in Skills Foundation

    Employees can view the skill names and their descriptions translated when they change their preferred language to a non-English language. For information on the languages supported by AI Search, see Activate a language.
    Note:
    • Make sure that the respective language plugins are installed to ensure that the skill translations are also downloaded for those languages.
    • If you have custom skills, you must get the custom skills translated and upload them separately.
    • When searching for skills using the Search option, use only your preferred language. For example, if your preferred language is Dutch, you search in Dutch.

    Hiring core for Skills Foundation

    Hiring Core provides a repository to store information for your hiring requirements. Activate the Hiring Core plugin (app-hiring-core) to start using it. Skills Foundation runs predictions on the data in the hiring core tables and offers skill recommendations for role groups. For more information, see Hiring Core.

    Key benefits

    Connect skills to action in the transformation of your workforce and accelerate business outcomes by using the Skills Foundation application.

    Table 1. Skills Foundation benefits
    Features Benefits
    Employee skills profile Provides a comprehensive view of the skills that your employees have.
    Pre-seed employee skills Identifies the essential skills of an employee by analyzing the external data and data provided by employees about skills and titles. Prompt employees to update their skills based on this information.
    About Job Architecture Associates the career data of your organization with skills.
    Proactive Prompts for Skills Foundation Enables contextual and proactive engagement for your managers and employees by bringing actionable insights as prompts into their flow of work.
    Import skills from your resume or LinkedIn profile Imports skills from resumes and LinkedIn profiles of the employees.
    Note:
    This feature is only available to customers with a Pro-plus license.
    Validated skills Managers validate the skill proficiency level of employees in the Manager Hub and employees can see these validated skills on their skills profile.
    View activity insights Managers can view and review activities related to the skill that an employee has made progress on before validated them.
    Add skills by using the skill recommender Enables your employees to search for skills that they’re interested in developing or improving and then adding them to their skills profile.